


If You Love Me, Don't Let Go

by pinstripedJackalope



Series: TSC Oneshots [7]
Category: Shadowhunters (TV), The Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare, The Shadowhunter Chronicles - All Media Types, The Shadowhunter Chronicles - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst with a Happy Ending, Crying, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Malec, Past Character Death, Reincarnation, Soulmate AU, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 19:40:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24382204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinstripedJackalope/pseuds/pinstripedJackalope
Summary: In a world where the first words your soulmate will ever speak to you are marked on your wrist, lifetime after lifetime after lifetime, Magnus is (currently) a lawyer who is dating a semi-famous writer.  He and Alec had a bad time last time around, but that’s in the past.Isn’t it?
Relationships: Magnus Bane/Alec Lightwood
Series: TSC Oneshots [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1659478
Comments: 15
Kudos: 132





	If You Love Me, Don't Let Go

**Author's Note:**

  * For [notcrypticbutcoy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notcrypticbutcoy/gifts).
  * Inspired by [I'll Love You in a Thousand Lifetimes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10421970) by [notcrypticbutcoy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notcrypticbutcoy/pseuds/notcrypticbutcoy). 



> The title is from Unsteady by the X ambassadors, and the story itself is based on lifetimes #6 and #7 from notcrypticbutcoy’s fic _I’ll Love You in a Thousand Lifetimes_! You should probably read that one first if you want to understand this one. This one might stand on its own, but honestly the fic it's based on is so good I'm not sure why you _wouldn't_ read it.

Magnus doesn’t think much about his last life. The one where he died of AIDs in a hospital room in San Fransisco, that is. Of all the lives he’s lived, all the adventures he’s had, that one was the shortest and the saddest, the least romantic. It hurt, of course… it still hurts. But he’s not the kind of person to dwell on tragedy. 

Usually. He’s not _usually_ the kind of person to dwell on tragedy. When Alec leaves him to reorganize the apartment on his day off while Alec is off at a meeting with his editing team and Magnus finds the box pushed to the back of a closet shelf all covered in dust, however… well. Suffice to say that _usually_ goes out the window.

Sitting at the kitchen table, Magnus huffs out something too wet to be a laugh, squeezing it up past the lump growing like fungus in his throat. It hurts, almost as bad as the ache deep in his chest that echoes across the dividing line of death itself. 

He and Alec… they’ve been doing good. More than good, even. There’s a word to describe the feeling of ‘ _officially moving in with your kind-of-famous soulmate slash the love of your life several months after finally getting to meet him in person_ ’ and that word is _fantastic_. Waking up every morning next to Alec, going to sleep beside him every night, sharing all the little things that domestic life has to offer… yeah. Things have been going _great_. 

…Magnus really should have left the box alone.

Hindsight, alas. He huffs again, swiping a hand across his cheek. His eyeliner is running. He didn’t realize he’d need the waterproof one today, ugh. Unfortunately, getting up to fetch a tissue is a little too much for him right now, so runny eyeliner it is. He blinks through the tears, staring down at the innocent pile of paper on the table before him. Even though his vision is blurred he can still clearly see the words that begin at the top of the page, seared into his mind’s eye.

_They say that you can die of a broken heart. I didn't believe them… not until it happened to me._

Magnus has read every word that Alexander Lightwood has ever published. This story… this tragedy… it’s one that Alec never shared. At least, not with the world. Did he show it to his family? His manager, Lydia? His editors? How old was he when he decided to confront this one? Was he young, fourteen years old and just learning how to write, putting words to paper to describe the first past life that came to mind? Or was he eighteen, grappling with coming out of the closet? Or maybe twenty-four, just after his first NY Times bestseller. Or perhaps twenty-seven, after his interview with that talk show host that Magnus secretly hates… _god_. _Who was the Alec who felt compelled to pen this story_?

He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know why fate made them wait so long this time around, why it kept them separate for thirty-some long years. Perhaps it thought they both needed some time for themselves after that last one. All he knows is that there is a piece of him that wishes, with an ache so sharp that it nearly burns, that he could have been there to comfort that Alec, whoever he was.

Magnus sniffles, wiping his eyes again. Then, once his vision is clear, he sets to reading through the pages once again. 

He reads past the beginning, the “ _They say that you can die of a broken heart. I didn_ _’t believe them… not until it happened to me_ ,” bit. 

He reads past the part where Alec comes face to face with him, Magnus, for the first time. Their soulmeeting, their first and last meeting in that lifetime. 

He reads the part where he lies dying in Alec’s arms, as they talk about anything and everything. 

He reads the part where he closes his eyes, and his chest falls for the last time…

…and then he keeps going. To the part of the story that goes like _this_ :

 _Jace arrived twenty minutes after the flatline. I heard him, sort of, as he told the nurses and staff to leave us alone—it was like I was underwater, like the pressure of fluid was ringing in my ears. I felt so full it was as if I was empty all over again, vibrating so fast that I might as well have been at a standstill. And Magnus, my dearest Magnus_ _… to have him so limp in my arms…_

_I couldn'_ _t let go. I was the only thing keeping him warm. I felt like I had to hold on, like the moment I let go I would lose him for real. It was a superstitious moment, a moment of faith—for as long as I held him he would be kept warm through my body heat, and he would still, in some sense, be alive. He wouldn’t be touched by the chill of death._

_For four hours I held him like that, the heat of my own body the only thing keeping him warm. It felt like I could have stayed there forever, until I crumbled away to ash, my own body heat burning me up like the ember inside a piece of coal burning it from the inside out. And then arrived the moment when it all came crumbling down. Because of course I couldn'_ _t stay there forever. They needed the room. They needed to sanitize it. They needed to deal with the body. They, they, they—god, I hated Them. Everyone who wasn’t Magnus or me was one of Them, and I HATED THEM. Even Jace, who I loved dearly, was someone Other in that moment._

_“I’m sorry,” he said, after four hours, and tried to pull me away._

_The silence, the superstition, the faith, it all broke when he did that. I felt like I was coming apart, like my heart was the Big Bang and I was exploding from singularity to infinity. It was so much inside me and it came out as screams because I couldn'_ _t… I didn’t have any way to contextualize the pain of moving from this moment to the next. From a moment where Magnus was alive in my arms, warmed by my warmth, and one where he was a cooling body ready for the morgue._

_I remember fighting. I fought tooth and nail to hold onto him, arguing all the while that they couldn'_ _t take him away from me, not now, not when I was the only thing keeping him warm. But who could win an argument like that? Not me. Not when I was fighting a bunch of doctors and medical staff, the kind who have grown numb to death, who have put it on a schedule not because they are cold and heartless but because they need to save their compassion for the next dying person._

_Jace had given me four hours, and that was already too long._

_“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, when I was too exhausted to fight anymore. He had his arms wrapped around my waist, the only thing holding me up—he stumbled as I collapsed, every scrap of structural integrity leaving me all at once. I was crying. I think I had been crying for a while._

_He didn'_ _t let go. He didn’t let go of me even as he had to half-carry me to an on-call room, even as he bundled us both into a bed to wait out the storm. I woke up after god knows how long with his arms around me, holding me to his chest._

_I wish I could say that the funeral gave me closure. That_ _’s what they say is supposed to happen, right? That’s what everyone kept telling me. But I just… I couldn’t make sense of something so_ senseless _. Everyone around me leading up to the funeral was so understanding and I just—I_ couldn’t _understand. How could they make sense of something that had no reason, no logic? How could they fit this into their worldview? Either they were pretending that it made sense, that there was a rhyme and a reason for Magnus_ _’s death… or they didn’t care enough to see the truth of it. They didn’t care enough to see how stupid and pointless Magnus’s death had been. How absurd a world that would let me have him for a few scant hours and no longer actually was._

 _It didn_ _’t matter either way. It didn’t matter if they were pretending in order to try and help or if they were just blind to my suffering. It all amounted to the same thing—that they didn’t really_ get it _. I could have laughed, and I did some nights. It was either laugh or break something, the anger singing in my veins. How could they get it? My family, my friends_ _… most of them had_ no idea _what it was like to live cycle after cycle in a world that despised them. Sure, some centuries were better than others, but there was always this_ _… undercurrent. This murmur, this motion in the corners of my vision, telling me in words and gestures and glares on the subway that I wasn’t—that_ we _weren_ _’t—one of them. We were wrong. We were other. We were the queers, the gays, the slur after slur after slur. The only one who understood was Izzy, and even then she didn’t have our mother and father staring her down with the expectation that she would uphold the Lightwood name, continue the Lightwood bloodline. I was the firstborn, I was the eldest son—I was the one who was supposed to uphold everything and who disappointed them time after time after time._

 _So the funeral. The funeral that they all told me I should go to. I went. I stood under the beating sun in a suit that had seen some weddings and more funerals, and I just_ _… drifted. There weren’t many people—me, Izzy, Jace. A man who I think was Magnus’s father, who came for five minutes, looked into the coffin as if to make sure it actually was his son, and left again. An old woman, I don’t know who she was. And Magnus’s friends, four of them, gathered in a little group near the front._

_I recognized them in bits and pieces from past lives. The dark haired-dark skinned woman who Magnus was friends with in the servants'_ _quarters of a mansion in the Dutch East Indies. The stern-looking man who had once stood in the doorway of a church in the fifteenth century. The other two were just as familiar, though I had a harder time placing them—was the woman with the fair skin and light brown hair the same woman who sailed with us for a time on the high seas? Was the younger man with the Hispanic complexion the boy who Magnus took under his wing once upon a time?_

_Maybe they were. I didn'_ _t know. All I knew was that I met the eyes of one of them—Catarina, if memory serves—and felt again that explosive pressure, that infinity pressing up against the insides of my chest._

_I broke eye contact and didn'_ _t meet her eyes again, not even at the reception afterward when she took my hand and introduced herself and offered her telephone number should I need someone to talk to._

_She thanked me for staying with him at the end. The hospital wouldn'_ _t let them in, she said, and her voice was cold with a fury that I understood completely. I nodded, and I took the number, but… I never did call. It just… it hurt too much. It hurt, and it hurt, and it felt like it would never end. I felt trapped. Just… trapped in a nightmare. Every day cycling on and on and on…_

_I didn'_ _t kill myself. I didn’t die voluntarily. But at the same time, I know that I could have kept going. I just… didn’t really want to. My heart had been broken and when the time came I didn’t fight. I let it happen._

_I don'_ _t know what the argument was about. Something senseless, I’m sure. All I know is that when I took the knife that was aimed at Jace I did it on instinct. And when I was lying on the floor and Jace was hovering above me telling me to hold on until the ambulance came, his voice muffled like I was underwater, the only thing I could think of was body heat._

_It was like I was back there all over again, in that four hours of an eternity, holding Magnus_ all over again _. But this time, instead of feeling so full that I was empty and vibrating so fast I was still, it was like I was actually empty, actually still. Instead of me offering my warmth to someone else, it was Jace offering his to me. And instead of fighting to hold on_ _… I just let go. Of everything. Of the pain and the grief, of the vitality of youth and life, of all the years I might have had left in this lifetime._

 _I let go, and when I did_ _… it was with the knowledge that I’d meet Magnus again soon._

…Soon. Magnus runs his jeweled fingers over the last line, committing it to memory. Another tear falls, and he quickly wipes it from the paper. It leaves behind a grayish smear.

Alec is going to be home soon. Magnus realizes this literally seconds before the key rattles in the lock. He glances frantically at the papers, at the box, at the closet, but—it’s no use. Alec is already inside, shrugging off his backpack. Magnus waits, frozen in place, as Alec turns to him, _and_ —

—soft hands rise, cupping Magnus’s cheeks with a gentleness that wrenches something deep inside him. He can’t hold in the sob.

“Hey, hey… what’s the matter?” Alec asks, a touch frantic. 

There’s no way to hide this. Magnus gestures at the papers, eyes squinted as he hiccups, “I’m so _sorry_.”

Alec goes still. His hands twitch on Magnus’s cheeks. Magnus doesn’t want to see the look on his face so he throws both hands over his eyes, trying to get control over himself. He’s a bar-certified thirty-some-year-old lawyer, he should not be sitting in the kitchen _bawling_ , for god’s sake.

Then, slowly, he feels Alec’s hands slip away, only to fall to Magnus’s shoulders, holding him steady. “Magnus… why are you sorry?” Alec asks, and instead of condemnation there is only concern in his voice.

“For r-reading it. And for—for having unprotected sex, god, that was so _stupid_ —”

A gentle tug, and Magnus’s hands fall away. He looks up, excepting to see the dawning realization spread across Alec’s face as he comes to the conclusion that all his suffering was Magnus’s fault. 

Alec, however, doesn’t so much as twitch in that direction. His eyes are earnest, concerned, as he gives his head a quick shake as if to shake away the very idea. “I told you then and I’ll tell you now, I don’t care what you did. It wasn’t your fault. I—god, how much do you remember of that one?”

“All of it. Every second of you holding me. I never knew you remembered it, too. It was over so quick—and we had so little time—I just thought—I _assumed_ —”

Magnus shudders, trying to put words to the feeling of _pain_ that is lancing through his chest. He hurt Alec so deeply when he died and he had _no idea_. No idea how hard Alec grieved, how much he suffered. It was over in the blink of an eye for Magnus, in and out of feverish dreams the entire time and then he was gone, all in one fell swoop. In the haze of dying, of his own pain and suffering, it slipped his mind that Alec was going to have to live on beyond him. 

But Alec did. Alec, gentle Alec, the Alec who is now gathering Magnus close, pressing Magnus’s cheek to his chest, his beating heart, a direct parallel to a lifetime not-so-long-passed. Magnus sobs as his boyfriend strokes his hair gently. 

“Honestly,” Alec says, after Magnus has calmed some, his voice low and sweet. Magnus has almost forgotten the words he spoke, but Alec draws them back with a gentle, “how could I ever forget? The odds were stacked against us and it wasn’t fair but _still_ you fought so hard for me. You fought even when you told me you couldn’t take it anymore. I could _never_ forget that. What can I say—you always make a lasting impression, Magnus Bane.”

A watery laugh eases from Magnus’s chest, taking with it some of the tension he’s been holding since he started reading. Alec leans down, pressing kisses to the crown of his head, and god, it’s exactly like it was then, in those last hours, those last moments—except this time Magnus’s heart is beating so strong in his chest, and his lungs are fit and clear, and his blood is hale and healthy, and he’s alive alive _alive_. Everything they missed, everything they lost last time around—it’s here now. It’s in their grasp. And Magnus… he’s never going to let go. Not in this life, or the next, or the next. 

Not now and not ever.


End file.
